


Basement

by Piinutbutter



Category: Arrangement - Vanessa Cardui
Genre: Dehumanization, F/F, Post-Canon, Psychological Horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-02
Updated: 2017-12-02
Packaged: 2019-02-09 19:09:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,366
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12894792
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Piinutbutter/pseuds/Piinutbutter
Summary: No matter what collar she wore, and no matter what Lisa called her, this was what she was: Something to make Lisa happy.





	Basement

**Author's Note:**

  * For [nonnymouse](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nonnymouse/gifts).



> Thank you for the inspiringly kinky prompts!
> 
> Additional content notes:
> 
> 1\. If you've read the source material for this fic, you know what kind of consent issues are involved in this situation. Originally I planned to tag this as "extremely dubious consent," but I think it's more accurate to label it "consent that was once upon a time hanging out in Dubious Land, but fell off a cliff a while back and has been lying, bleeding, in a ditch ever since."
> 
> 2\. There's a one-paragraph mention of watersports. Not enough to really tag for, but it's here.

The basement thing’s hair was starting to grow back. Lisa noticed it one afternoon, after the thing’s bath, when drops of icy cold water fell to the floor. They were dripping off of actual strands of hair - short strands, but no longer quite the ugly, awkward fuzz that the basement thing had been sporting since Maddie had made the mistake of shaving her head.

“Look at you,” Lisa commented, scratching the top of the basement thing’s head. “You’re starting to look like a person again. Kinda. Almost.”

She could say that kind of thing, now. There was no risk of putting ideas into the basement thing’s head. The basement thing knew she wasn’t a person.

“That’s good, actually, because I think things are getting serious with this guy I’m seeing.” Lisa hung the hose up on the wall. “I told you about Marcus, right? Well, whatever. He’s cool. We met at my job.” She leaned against the medical table.

“And, like, we’ve had sex a couple times,” Lisa continued. “Nothing wild. But I think Maddie rubbed off on me, because my Spidey sense is telling me he’s got a ton of kinks he’s too scared to tell me about. And I’ve been thinking, well...” She gestured to the basement, the bland concrete decorated only with items necessary for the basement thing’s upkeep. “That’s what you’re here for, right? You don’t mind sharing.”

It wasn’t a question. The basement thing nodded anyway.

“Right.” Lisa smiled, though not at her. “Obviously I’m not just gonna start the conversation with ‘hey, wanna come see my sex slave?’ And I won't even bring it up for a couple more weeks. But, y’know. I can ease him into it. You can ease most people into it, if you're smart about it. Maddie showed me that.”

Lisa pushed herself off the medical table. It was time for her to go to work. Usually, she looked so sad when she left for the day, but these last couple weeks, it seemed like she had something to look forward to. The basement thing was happy for Lisa - and for the fact that Lisa wasn’t as harsh on her, when her mood was like this. She would accept any treatment Lisa wanted to give her, of course she would, but sometimes...it was hard.

She watched Lisa leave, then shook her head like a dog. Her hair was starting to tickle her neck.

 

* * *

 

Lisa didn’t return to the basement for over a day. Maybe two. Maybe longer than that.

The basement thing didn’t want to get upset. Lisa could do whatever she wanted. But Lisa hadn’t left her too much food, and by now her hunger pangs had turned from annoying to painful. Just when she started to worry that something had happened to Lisa, she heard footsteps outside her door.

The look on Lisa’s face when she came in reminded the basement thing of the night after Nathan broke up with her. Lisa’s eyes were red, her face was sallow and angry, and nervousness swelled instinctively in the basement thing’s stomach. Not enough to stop her from crawling over to greet Lisa, rubbing her face against the worn-thin fabric of Lisa’s sweatpants.

“Hey,” Lisa said, the word almost a sigh. She rubbed at the skin under her eyes with a knuckle. “Sorry. In advance. For tonight.”

The basement thing wasn’t sure exactly what had Lisa so upset, at first. Lisa didn’t bother to tell her. She was too busy strapping the basement thing onto the examination table. The basement thing made it easy for her, climbing up onto the table as soon as Lisa looked at it for more than a couple seconds, her eyes narrowing as she decided on her stress relief for the night.

But Lisa had developed a habit of mumbling to herself - or as good as, given that the basement thing couldn’t talk - when she was using her basement thing particularly hard. Maybe it was a loneliness thing, or a stress thing. The basement thing didn’t care, so long as she could be there for Lisa, so long as she could be good and make Lisa feel better.

As Lisa set about laying into the basement thing’s thighs with a cane, the basement thing gained a blurry picture of Lisa’s situation from the angry mutterings that were only occasionally loud enough for her to hear over the cracks of the cane and her own whimpers and moans. Two phrases she definitely heard were “...lay _me_ off,” and “...fucking _course_ nobody needs me.” Then Lisa brought the cane down on her clit, and she couldn’t think about anything else besides the pain.

Lisa liked the noises she made at that. When she finally set - more like tossed - the cane aside, the basement thing’s inner thighs and pussy were both a vivid, painful red, and the basement thing could feel every pulse of her blood everywhere she’d been struck. She was crying, but so was Lisa. Lisa didn’t bother to wipe her tears away before shoving her own sweatpants down, freeing one of the basement thing’s legs, throwing it over her shoulder, and grinding their pussies together with no semblance of tenderness.

It would have been pleasurable any other time, but after how hard Lisa had hit her, the friction was sharp, hot, and painful. The basement thing squirmed, but Lisa either didn’t notice or didn’t care. She was focused on getting herself off, not even looking at the basement thing’s face, her hair hanging around her head, which was turned down in concentration. Lisa’s breath came fast and hard, mixed with small grunts of exertion, but her breath cut off for a few strangled seconds when she finally came.

But she didn’t pull away. Instead, she dug her nails into the basement thing’s wounded thigh, her eyes closed in concentration as she took a deep breath. A moment later, the basement thing felt hot wetness streaming against her skin and pooling on the table and floor below them.

When Lisa did finally move away, she tugged her sweatpants up and undid the basement thing’s restraints with clinical, businesslike motions. She gave the basement thing and the table a quick blast with the hose, and checked to make sure she hadn’t done any serious damage, but she didn’t even look her in the eye before heading back upstairs.

 

* * *

 

Their routine changed the morning after that episode.

At least, the basement thing thought it was morning. There were no windows in the basement, and time wasn’t something she bothered to keep track of. But it was during the mornings that Lisa came down and washed the basement thing down with the hose, and touched the back of the thing’s neck. Which was a habit of hers, and the basement thing always loved it when she did that. But this time, it wasn’t just the warmth of Lisa’s fingers against her skin. Instead, something wrapped around her throat.

The basement thing waited for pressure, taking a deep breath, but Lisa didn’t choke her. Instead, the leather wrapped comfortably around her neck. She froze. That wasn’t the heavy weight of Eight’s collar.

“Congrats, Sandy,” Lisa announced, stepping back and crossing her arms. She looked a lot better today than she did last night. Her eyes had cleared up, and she'd gotten dressed properly, with jeans and shoes and everything. “I’ve decided I need some change in my life. And by ‘some,’ I mean I want to see how hard it is for you to act like a pet after being a thing for so long. Shouldn’t be too much of a challenge, right?”

The basement thing - Eight - Sandy shivered. Sandy was so long ago. It was hard to even imagine being Sandy.

There was a thick cuff around Sandy’s ankle that Lisa kept chained to one of the loops in the wall. Lisa unlocked it, then started to walk away.

“I’m gonna go get a few things. Try and stand up for me, will you?”

That was...no. Sandy hadn’t stood on her own two feet in, well...certainly not since becoming the basement thing, but she had spent a long time as Eight before that, and Maddie had trained standing out of her pretty damn well.

But Lisa wanted it. She had to try.

Sandy’s muscles protested at the first attempt, her back and her knees and her thighs and the soles of her feet freaking out at the novel movement. That was almost worse than the stabbing pain Maddie had used to keep her crawling in the first place, and she returned to the floor just to make the pain stop for a moment.

But Lisa wanted her to stand.

When Lisa came back down the stairs, Sandy was in an awkward transition stance, leaning heavily against the wall as she convinced herself that her feet really needed to stay flat on the floor at the moment. Lisa just looked at her and nodded, in that way she always did, where Sandy couldn’t tell if she was disappointed or pleased or just affirming to herself that what was happening in the moment was real.

“Does it feel weird?” Lisa asked, setting a plastic grocery bag down on the medical table.

She nodded hesitantly.

“See? So you haven’t forgotten everything,” Lisa said, and it sounded sort of like a compliment but also totally not like one. “Sandy doesn’t stand too much, though, so you can get back down on your knees.”

Sandy did, and the relief went beyond her muscles and into her mind. It was so much safer on the ground.

“Here.” Lisa pulled something out of the bag. It was a square-shaped book, the kind that decorated coffee tables. Sandy looked away from it without even an attempt to read the title. Lisa noticed.

“Yeah, so. I want you to read again.”

Sandy whimpered.

“Not, like, a ton. I know Maddie didn’t like Sandy reading. But Sandy could, if she wanted to.” Lisa crouched down and set the book in front of her, opening it to a random page. Most of the page’s surface was covered by a glossy photo of a waterfall, with a small caption on the far right that Sandy’s eyes glazed over completely.

“Samantha would be appalled at this,” Lisa pointed out. “The placement of the text is pretty awful, even I can tell that. But it’s legible. And you’re not moving, eating, or drinking until I think you’ve actually read it.”

It was just like when she was being trained _not_ to read, ironically. Lisa grabbed a whip, or a crop when she got bored of that, and made Sandy focus on the words. Sandy got a headache just from looking at the block of thinly-spaced text, and things went blurry the first few times she tried to process what it was actually saying. When she looked away, or looked like she wasn’t trying hard enough, or when Lisa just felt like it, Lisa hit her.

She did understand it, though. Her head was pounding, and her skin was sharp red and covered in marks that would become bruises soon enough, but she did as she was told, and Lisa was satisfied.

“Okay, cool. Now, it’s lunchtime.”

Sandy expected to be left alone. Instead, Lisa snapped and pointed at the floor beside her.

“Come,” she ordered, heading out of the basement.

Sandy froze completely, eyes wide. She’d been in the basement since the day she arrived. Leaving it had never occurred to her as a possibility.

But Lisa wanted her to follow. So she did. Crawling up stairs on her hands and knees was awkward, and the homey kitchen-slash-living room that Lisa led her into felt positively alien. She didn’t belong here. She was for the basement, for when Lisa needed a break from this oppressively domestic space.

Lisa didn’t give her any other orders, so Sandy stayed still, watching as Lisa put a bowl in the microwave and turned it on.

“Here’s another thing,” Lisa said, leaning against the counter and shoving one hand into the pocket of her jeans. They were girl jeans, so most of her hand didn’t even fit, but she didn’t seem to care. “And this is, like...Maddie was big on the differences between Samantha and Sandy and Eight. I’m not as picky. I know this isn’t what you would really be doing as Sandy with her, but I want you do it, so. Yeah.”

It wasn’t a question, but Sandy nodded anyway.

The microwave beeped angrily, and Lisa withdrew the bowl. It wasn’t Sandy’s dog bowl, but a normal ceramic bowl, filled with leftover spaghetti that wasn’t quite heated up all the way. She set it down on the floor in front of Sandy, but before Sandy could move to eat it, Lisa set a fork and a knife down beside the bowl.

Sandy stared at them blankly. She couldn't remember the last time she'd used silverware.

Lisa pushed a hand into her own hair, leaning back against the counter and letting out a long sigh. “See, Sandy, I guess this is why it’s so reassuring to have you around. It’s like: I may be a fuckup. I may not be able to keep a boyfriend, and I may not be able to keep a job. But, y’know what, at least I can stand and read and use a fucking fork. That's gotta count for something.”

Sandy found her lips twisting into the slightest semblance of a smile. The expression felt foreign on her face, and she couldn’t remember the last time she had really smiled, but it was the right thing to do. Because she was making Lisa happy.

And Sandy knew this was only temporary. She knew that Lisa was only doing this so she could wring more enjoyment out of shaping Sandy back into Eight, then back into the basement thing. Or maybe in a different order. Or maybe Lisa would make her something new entirely. But she knew her owner, and she knew herself. No matter what collar she wore, no matter what Lisa called her, this was what she was: Something to make Lisa happy.


End file.
